


Good Grief

by lookninjas



Series: Children's Work [26]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Camping, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 10:52:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15338280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lookninjas/pseuds/lookninjas
Summary: Seventeen years ago, they had the whole summer for this -- Ben and Rey, brother and sister.  Now they have ten days.  It isn't enough, maybe, but it's more than Rey would've asked for.  She would've settled for a long weekend.





	Good Grief

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place around Memorial Day 2017, so after Leia's death and Ben and Poe's wedding, but before the events of Poor Atlas. It really was cold and kind of awful that year, too. Title's from the Dessa song of the same name, but you knew that already.

Ben’s arm is wrapped around her shoulders. 

The sky is hazy, white-gray; it’s stopped raining for the moment but it’ll probably start again soon. It’s been raining since they hit Clare, maybe even sooner than that. She woke up to it, the sound of rain against the roof of her old Jeep, curled up in the passenger seat as Ben drove. She’s always slept easily with Ben in the driver’s seat. But then she woke up and it was raining and the world outside the window was different in a way she couldn’t totally explain but always felt, somehow. The trees thicker, taller. The hills steep and frequent. 

Home. 

Maybe. Maybe not. Four years has changed a lot of things.

Not everything, though.

She wraps both arms around Ben’s waist and curls tighter into his shoulder. He bends to rest his cheek against her hair. 

When she closes her eyes, she can almost see them, further down the beach. Ben at fifteen, his hair still short, ears sticking out. Broad shoulders and long skinny arms, reaching down to hold her hand. Her hair would’ve been braided down her back, simple. Her skirt would’ve been soaked in the waves. She doesn’t remember all of it, anymore -- that was a long time ago -- but she’s been thinking about that day a lot lately, heavy on her mind. Standing on the beach with Ben, their bare feet in the water. 

_And we’d come up here for the summer, all three of us. The whole summer._

Ben gave her the whole summer that year, or most of it. And he gave her summer after summer after that, too. Thirteen years’ worth of summers, give or take.

If all they can afford now is ten days, well. That’s still a lot more than she’d thought to ask him for. She’d have settled for a long weekend.

Some of that, maybe, is more about Ben than her -- some part of him that needs to be here just like he needed to be here that summer, to start healing. But she appreciates it anyway.

“Cold?” Ben asks. 

She is, in parts. Her heels and her arches and the balls of her feet on the wet sand, the freshly melted ice of Lake Michigan water rushing over her toes to her ankles. She feels the chill of it all the way up to the back of her knees. But everywhere she’s shielded by Ben is warm, and that’s enough for now.

“Not really,” she says.

“‘Kay.” Ben’s chest moves against her cheek when he breathes. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he just breathes so _heavy_ , like something inside him is laboring even when it seems like he’s just standing still. Sometimes, Rey can guess at what the problem is. Sometimes she can’t quite. 

Today, it feels like the issue is still standing halfway down the beach, seventeen-or-so years in the past, talking about the things his mother promised but could never quite give.

“Let me know when you’re ready to go back to the camper,” he says.

It’s Rey’s turn, then, to say “‘Kay.” 

It starts raining again, a little. Ben pulls Rey closer.

 

*

 

They never really went camping, before.

Rey did Girl Scouts for a few years, so she spent a few summer weeks in drafty cabins, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, swimming in strange lakes with muddy bottoms, singing around bonfires _Oh Camp Sakakawea we love you!_ When they moved to the house by Cross Village, they’d set up a tent or two in the backyard for sleepovers, or even sometimes just on hot nights when neither of them wanted to be in the house anymore. They’d light a fire and roast marshmallows and listen to the drone of the grasshoppers all around them, the sun setting over the field of tall grass that stretched behind their house all the way to the treeline. But they were still at the house, really -- the bathroom was still there, and the kitchen, and all the rest of it. It wasn’t really camping at all.

Then again, this isn’t _that_ much different. They have tents, but so far the cold has confined them to the camper at night. The bathroom isn’t much, but the toilet flushes, and the shower has a little hot water. And yeah, they’re in the state park, but it’s maybe fifteen minute’s walk to a grocery store with a Starbucks in it. There’s no wifi, but the 4G signal is plenty strong. Rey could check her e-mail. She could check her e-mail right now, if she wanted to.

She isn’t going to, partially because… Well. She doesn’t really want to. But she could. Maybe she should, even. It’s going to be overwhelming, when she gets back.

It’s overwhelming now. It’s _been_ overwhelming. When she first thought about postponing grad school to try to do -- she’s still not sure, but something useful, something real -- her biggest fear was that there would be nothing for her, no use, nothing at all. Apparently everyone was sincere when they told her how much they loved her Women’s March speech and hoped they could work with her in the future. She has more offers than she knows what to do with. It’s just that… well. None of them feel right.

And so. The woods, or at least this corner of them, by the lake and the grocery store and the Starbucks. No e-mail.

And always, and most importantly, Ben. Smiling easily at her from the other side of the fire he built, shielded by a canopy from the persistent drizzle. 

Ben will check his e-mail, probably sometime tomorrow morning before Rey wakes up. Not for all the people who want him -- to write something, to say something, to simply be there for whatever they’re doing -- but because he’s picked one thing, specifically, to do. He’s found a path again.

Rey doesn’t resent that as much as she would expect to. Anyway, they’re like that, her and Ben. Brother and sister. They take turns.

She smiles back at him. “Is it a cop-out if we go get KFC for dinner?” she asks.

Ben just shrugs. “I won’t tell if you won’t,” he says.

There isn’t anyone to tell, of course. There never really was.

“Deal,” Rey says.

 

*

 

It rains a little harder that night. It doesn’t open up the way it could, the way it does in late July or August when the storms roll in sudden and soak everything, but. Harder. Enough that the patter of rain on the roof of the camper is keeping Rey awake. She always thought it was supposed to be the other way around. Maybe it is. Maybe it is, and the rain just isn’t enough. It’s plausible. She slept heavy that first week after graduation, but ever since…

Ben is still in the bed next to her, but he isn’t sleeping either, she’s pretty sure. 

She’s pretty sure he’s _listening_. 

_I know it sounds crazy_ , Ben said, and Rey told him _No, it doesn’t,_ because it didn’t. Anyway, she was with him when it happened. She’d seen his knife go still against the cutting board, seen his face go white. Seen the way his hands shook as he fumbled for his phone, fingers still sticky from the garlic he’d been mincing. What he could have known, what he couldn’t -- it didn’t matter. He’d known. Rey saw it in his face before she even knew what had happened.

_Try not to die before me, okay?_ he’d asked, later, and she told him,

_That’s gonna be a problem, because you’re not allowed to die at all_ , and he laughed a little, tears in his eyes, and said,

_I guess we’re gonna be immortal, then._

Which would be nice, if they could. But.

Anakin wasn’t much older than Leia, when he died. She doesn’t even really know how she knows that -- it’s just there, in the back of her mind. That limit. Ben’s a long way away from it; she’s even further, but they both get closer, every day.

Anakin died of cancer. She knows that, too. Leia had a heart defect. Completely unrelated. She knows that. She and Ben both went to their respective doctors, they both came back with completely clean bills of health, apart from they both need to sleep more. She knows that. She knows.

(She knows, too, that it wasn’t completely absurd for her to get the same battery of tests that Ben did. The x-rays, the stress test, the electrocardiogram -- Hux’s father had been the one to suggest it, but Rey already knew. Had pieced it together long before. 

(Ben was family even before he became her brother. She knew. In a way, she probably always knew.)

The rain patters on the roof of the camper. Ben shifts incrementally towards her, still _listening_. If he’s figured it out, what she sounds like, he hasn’t told her yet. Rey isn’t sure he will. She doesn’t know if that’s the point.

Maybe she sounds like rain. That would be nice, she thinks. To sound like rain.

Ben’s hands fold around hers. She listens to the rain, and eventually it lulls her to sleep.

 

*

 

“This is weird,” she says, a little after lunch. It’s still raining -- it’s still chilly, but she has one of Ben’s flannels on and her feet tucked up under her skirt and the fire is going and Ben is boiling water for coffee and there is a little bubble underneath the canopy and next to the camper that isn’t quite like being inside, but it has the same safety and warmth to it. 

Ben blinks at her, head cocked to the side. She remembers, suddenly, meeting a turkey vulture when she was little. Not before Ben, but after -- elementary school, maybe? Petoskey, she thinks, not Harbor. Everyone else was afraid of it, but she wasn’t. She liked it. She liked its bright black eyes and the tip of its head and the way it bent in to tug at her shoelaces, strange and delicate and inquisitive. It felt like it wanted to be her friend, and if she could’ve, she would’ve adopted it on the spot. 

She will never, ever be able to tell Ben that he reminds her of a turkey vulture without it coming out wrong.

Actually, he’d probably take it okay no matter how it came out. He’s like that sometimes.

“What’s weird?” he asks, still blinking, and Rey shrugs, rolls her shoulders.

“This,” she says, and when he still doesn’t get it, says, “Just… hanging out. Not doing anything. Not… like, having to stuff down a taco one-handed while answering e-mails on my phone with the other and being late for something and trying to set up something else and just -- This isn’t weird to you? Not running around in circles all the time?”

A shrug. Ben is so perfectly at home here underneath the pines, in his flannel and jeans, long hair tied back. He should have a cabin somewhere. He probably never will, but he should. “Honestly, I don’t run around that much,” he says. “I will, probably, if we pull this restaurant thing off, but right now it’s mostly… I pretend I’m going to write but never really do, I keep the apartment clean and do a lot of cooking, and every couple weeks I go somewhere and say something really obvious, like ‘Homophobia is bad’ or ‘It’s possible to be religious and still have compassion for others’ or ‘The President is supposed to _not_ violate the Constitution.’ And then I go home and I’m a house husband again. Honestly I’ve been thinking of taking up knitting, although I guess this may not be a good time, if the restaurant happens. Which it may not.”

Rey rolls her eyes. “It will, and you know it,” she says, and Ben shrugs again. 

The kettle whistles. Ben carefully removes it from its hook over the fire, carries it over to the little table and sets it down on a trivet next to the french press -- and that’s such a Ben thing, bringing a french press camping. It’s like the braiding, almost. He couldn’t just learn to do adequate. He always has to keep trying, learning, improving. He started off making sloppy joes in a school cafeteria, and now he’s going to have a restaurant.

“Are you going to bake your own bread?” she asks, as he pours steaming water into the press. “At the restaurant, I mean. Will you have homemade bread?”

“Hopefully,” Ben says. He messes around with the press, stirring the coffee up and down. “I mean, it sounds nice, but. We’d need a lot of extra space, more ovens -- It might not be practical for right now. I’ve already got a couple of bakeries who’ve said they’d help out if we needed it.”

“Won’t be the same, though,” Rey says, and Ben just shrugs again.

“No,” he says. “But. It’s not like we wouldn’t still have good bread. Anyway, there’s always compromise. You know? We stop fighting for the extra ovens, we get a better location. We don’t have to have people in first thing in the morning baking, so we can have more people in the kitchen when there’s customers around. Some things you don’t give up, but. This isn’t one of those things. Just bread.”

_Just bread_. There isn’t meant to be a lesson in this. Rey can already feel herself starting to turn it over in her head, looking for one. Maybe she’s been spending too much time with Luke. 

“Although,” Ben adds, with a sigh. “Would’ve been a good use of all that starter. Still feels weird throwing so much of it out now. I don’t understand how I no longer know anyone who bakes. So fucking weird.”

“I could learn to bake,” Rey says, because she doesn’t want to point out that what’s really weird is hearing him curse again, like his mouth’s finally caught up to the idea that she’s an adult and he doesn’t have to worry about her repeating things in front of a classroom of five year-olds. “Not like I don’t have time for it, now.”

Ben finally turns away from the coffee to look at her, his eyes very soft. “Yeah, well, that won’t last long.” He smiles, soft soft soft, and then turns back to what he’s doing. “But I’ll give you some starter when we get home, if you want. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be the one with the bakery. And I’ll get all my bread from you.”

Anyone else would be humoring her. Ben is not. Ben sincerely believes in her limitless possibilities, and has from the start, and it has always freaked her out and it still does. 

“Hey,” Ben says, getting up from the table, and Rey quickly drops her eyes to the fire, not that it helps her any. “Hey. Rey. It’s all right. You’ll figure it out.”

“You don’t know that,” Rey says, to the fire. Fire doesn’t know anything; it just burns. Ben knows too much. That burns too, differently.

Ben crouches next to her, places his hand on hers. “You’ll figure it out,” he says again. “I have faith in you. I always have.”

It’s supposed to be the other way around. It _is_ the other way around. “It’s the other way around,” Rey tells him, and Ben kisses her temple.

“I have always had faith in you,” he says, because he’s stubborn, and he’s dumb, and he thinks too much of her and she has always lived up to it except now she’s afraid that she can’t, quite, and that’s the worst fear she’s ever known. “I always will.”

“Well,” Rey says, and doesn’t sniffle, and doesn’t feel her eyes stinging with tears or her chin wanting to fold up on itself. “Stop.”

Ben chuckles, and kneels up, and wraps his arms around her. “No,” he says, right in her ear, and she clings to his arm and doesn’t quite cry, just -- comes close for a while. Ben holds on while she does.

The coffee’s lukewarm by the time it’s all over. Ben just shrugs, puts the kettle on, and starts to prepare another pot.

 

*

 

She hadn’t quite expected the caterpillars.

She should’ve, probably. It’s late May, and that’s tent worm season. It isn’t bad in the park, which is mostly white pine, but still. Like junebugs and damselflies, the little bastards are everywhere. And everywhere, right now, includes Rey’s damn hair.

“I should get a buzzcut,” she mutters, cross-legged on a towel in front of Ben’s chair, warming her kneecaps at the fire. Lately it seems like all her best runs get ruined by something stupid. This one had been especially nice -- cool and damp and quick and muddy. Too short; the trail system in this park isn’t the longest, but still. “Just shave it all off and not have to worry about it.”

Ben hums, carefully picking bugs out of her hair. She’ll have to go all the way to the other end of the park to use the showers, that drafty unheated building with the grimy floors that she’s been avoiding all week, but she can’t wash her hair in the camper. She could if she had a buzzcut, but she doesn’t, so she can’t. So she has to walk. Sucks.

“I don’t know, you’d probably look good like that,” he says, eventually. “Kinda… I don’t know. Like Natalie Portman. Remember when she had the -- On Saturday Night Live, with the rap video? It looked good. If you wanted to. You don’t have to.”

_If you wanted to. You don’t have to._ Sometimes she wonders how many times she’s heard that from him. A lot, probably. It shouldn’t still be weird, but some days it is. “Yeah, but I’ve got that article, though. That whole -- the signature style thing? So it’s either the hair or the skirts, and I can’t --” She starts to shake her head, feels Ben’s gentle grip on her hair loosen, stops before he can let go. “Is that weird? That the hair thing feels… different, than the skirt thing? I don’t know; it just does. Like, I actually tried doing something about the whole… modesty thing, but. It felt fake. And I thought the hair thing would be weirder, because of Leia, but it isn’t. So if I shave my head now, then… I don’t know. Whole thing falls apart. And it’s kind of weird anyway, but. Less so, I guess. If it’s about the hair.”

“Oh,” Ben says, soft, and she can’t quite read his voice in that one word. “This is -- this is the _Vogue_ thing? The Hillary Clinton -- that thing?”

Of all the requests she’d gotten, by far the strangest, and probably that was why she said yes. Because of Ben, and the weird lefthand slant of his mind, his weird solutions to everything. (But also -- that one brief moment where she’d met Hillary, coming through Michigan, and she’d _believed_ ; the flowers and the card after Leia died; the e-mail after her speech at the Women’s March; and yeah, sometimes, the nights she spent staring at the ceiling thinking -- someone had to break through, eventually, and if not this time then maybe -- She wasn’t even sure she wanted to but _maybe_ \--)

“Yeah,” Rey says. “I was thinking -- I mean, I don’t _have_ to.” Because she doesn’t think he minds, exactly, but she should probably check. “I’m sure there’s something else, if you’d rather --”

“No,” very quickly, “no, no. I… No, of course you can. I’d… That’s fine. Totally fine. I…” He unfreezes -- reaches for the comb, starts slowly working at the ends of her hair. “Anyway, it’s not like my mom _invented_ braids, anyway; I remember my grandma always had, you know, the same kind of thing. Mom used to say that was why, or part of why -- that she wanted to have hair like that, you know, that she wanted to look like Grandma. I think sometimes --” 

He stops short, then, doesn’t finish. Doesn’t need to. Rey was never that much like Leia, not really, but she understood some things, like that weird push-pull between the old family and the new. Who she’d been and who she could be, if she wanted to.

And in the end, Rey did take the name Organa, so.

“And I kind of like having that be a part of it,” Rey says, as the comb starts working its way up. “That it connects back to that history, but… It’s different, too, in a lot of ways, and it just feels like it’s something that’s mine, you know? Moreso than the skirts, it feels like… So. Yeah. Not actually getting the buzzcut. Even if it would be easier to wash. And style. And… everything.”

“Yeah,” Ben says, but still soft and strange and weirdly awed in a way Rey isn’t totally sure she likes. “Well. Except haircuts. Those you’d have to do every week, probably. Way your hair grows.”

“Yeah, probably.” He’s not far off, anyway. Finn’s at the barber’s all the time, seems like. But that’s not really the point. They’re still dancing around that part. 

Rey takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. Stops dancing. “It is about you, though,” she says. “The article. Not totally, but a lot of it. Is about you.”

Quiet for a moment. “Okay,” Ben says, finally. “No, that’s… fine. I’m sure it’ll be -- I can’t wait to read it.”

Of course that means she’ll have to write it. Not just the one perfect first sentence she has yet to commit to paper, but. All of it. And it’ll have to be good -- Ben would love it anyway, but still. For a lot of reasons, it has to be really, really good. And pretty short. She really should start writing it.

“I’ll get it framed for you,” she says, just for the watery chuckle it gets her. “You can have it in your kitchen, at the restaurant. So everyone can see it.”

Ben counters with, “No, it’s going on the fridge,” and the awe is finally mostly out of his voice, so at least there’s some kind of relief. “I’ll stick it on the walk-in. With an alphabet magnet. No -- that felt pumpin one. With your third-grade picture in it? The one where you let Mellie ‘fix’ your braids for you and you wound up all teased out like --” He ruffles up her hair, and she slaps at him to make him do it more, make him laugh, make the tension drain out again. 

“You’re a dick,” she informs him, grinning. “You are. You’re the worst. The absolute worst of all time. I’m writing about how much you suck now.”

“Fair,” he says, and gives her one more gentle noogie before he starts smoothing her hair out once more. “Let me know when you want me to stop fixing your hair for you. Since I’m such a jerk and all.”

“I will,” Rey says, and Ben laughs, and they drift back into something almost like normal. 

Except for the way Ben looks at her after -- not always, just. Sometimes.

Enough.

 

*

 

She wakes to the sound of rain, again, and the smell of woodsmoke, and Ben already somewhere outside the camper. 

Not far, though. When Rey stumbles out into the gray world, she sees him -- broad back and long hair and ears sticking out -- sitting cross-legged by the fire. Praying.

She could join him. She could sit next to him, like she used to, and fold her hands in her lap like he had his folded in his, and close her eyes, and struggle for something to say to God. And wait for him to finish, and kiss her hair, and wonder why it was still so hard for her. Why it was always so hard for her.

She doesn’t. 

_You don’t have to_.

In this, at least, she’s finally started to believe him. 

Ben doesn’t move as she crosses over to the fire, but his shoulders tense a little; he’s been sensitive about it lately in a way he’s never been before. Skittish, almost. Rey lets her fingers drift over his arm as she passes, trying to comfort without disrupting him. It seems to help -- he breathes in, sighs it out, goes soft again. Small, almost.

_I think sometimes I just need to_ not _know what to do, you know? And it’s.. I mean, not that I can’t. With people. But sometimes it’s easier with Him. You know?_

She does and she doesn’t. She always will, in some ways, and then again she thinks sometimes she never will. 

It’s possible she just wasn’t ever really cut out for faith. She believes in Ben, but. So does Hux, and he’s the hardest atheist she knows. So that really doesn’t mean anything. 

She collects the french press and yesterday’s mugs from the table and carries them back to the camper. Ben softens by degrees as she moves -- he never quite looks up, but she can feel his attention following her, pulling back, finally withdrawing until he’s back in his head again, back communicating with something she cannot see. 

She leaves him to it, goes to wash the dishes.

 

*

 

_Ben didn’t know I’d been forbidden to wear braids, but I did._

She turns it over in her head -- it almost works, but there’s something… Too many verbs? Something… She should diagram it. She could split it up, maybe. _I wasn’t allowed to have my hair in braids. Ben didn’t know that. I did._ Too short, too Hemingway? Word count; she has to think of word count. She has to --

She has to fucking write it. She can edit it later.

_Braids are vanity, and vanity is sin. I learned that when I was five. But I guess no one ever told the Prophet Kylo Ren about that, because one of the first things he did after running from the First Order was braid my hair._

_And I guess I was every bit the sinner my stepfather said I was, because I let him._

There. That’s not bad.

It’s too much. It’s way too much. 

Her phone buzzes with a text. Finn. Thank God.

_Still cold all the way up there?_

It’s warmer, actually. A little. Not as warm as the weather back in Detroit (she’s been checking, every day, and seething a little, and then forcing herself to let it go), but at least it isn’t raining. _A little better. Supposed to get into the 70s by Friday. Still pack jeans and a sweatshirt, though. And no swimming!_

Puts the phone down. Picks her notebook back up. _I guess I was every bit the sinner my stepfather said I was_.

That’s the point, though, isn’t it? It’s a lot and it’s personal and it sucks, but --

Buzz. An emoji, smiley face with a tongue sticking out. Rey had never really gotten the hang of emojis. _People swim in worse. Like a polar bear plunge right? Get me a foil blanket I’ll be fine._

Ben did get a foil blanket, actually, as soon as they got north and saw what the weather was like. In case Finn still wanted to go swimming, he said. Rey’d slapped his shoulder, then, and he laughed. Jerk. 

_Ugh, no. I’m not driving you to the hospital when we’re supposed to be on vacation._

Finn doesn’t give her a chance to go back to her notebook again, sending her another emoji, this one a frowning face. Rey is still trying to figure out a response that doesn’t sound too much like someone’s mother when the next message comes through. _Still looking forward to it though. Get to see where you’re from. Some of it anyway._

Some of it, anyway. There’s not enough time for all of it, and probably there’s parts she doesn’t need him seeing, or things that don’t exist anymore. But they can have ice cream, and he can be dazzled by the lake, and she can laugh at him trying to set up a tent, and that’s a good enough place to start. _I’m looking forward to it, too._

Kissy face emoji. 

She considers it for a moment, then finally compromises with a _< 3_.

Finn’s reply is almost immediate. _!!! I’m corrupting you_.

It’s too apt. Rey glances down at her notebook, almost nervous. But. She’s made peace with this, now. She’s making peace with this. 

_Next thing you know I’ll be_ \--

She looks at it. Sighs. Backs up.

_Next thing you know, I’ll be skipping punctuation._

_God forbid._ He’s probably smiling down at the phone right now. The smile is the thing she misses most, when she’s not around him. He still feels like sunshine, years down the road. Probably he always will. _All right. I’ve got things to do and I don’t want to take you from your Walden retreat for too long. But I’ll see you in 24 hours or so._

_See you in 24 hours or so._ She’ll be glad to see him. A little, maybe -- it’s been good, just her and Ben. They don’t really get that anymore, and so having it for even a few days is pretty… It’s hard to find a right word, but it’s big and important and probably necessary in a lot of ways. But she misses Finn, too, and she knows Ben misses Poe, and his dad and everybody so. Having them come up for this last long weekend is good too. 

Kissy face emoji again.

_< 3_

She puts the phone down, picks up her notebook. 

_And I guess I was every bit the sinner my stepfather said I was, because I let him._

_What was worse, I liked it. I liked having the Prophet Kylo Ren’s attention on me; it made me feel important. And if my stepfather wanted to teach me anything, it was that I was not important at all. I was a nothing, a nobody. Not worth speaking to, not worth teaching, not worth wasting any kind of time on, even just a few minutes to smooth out my tangled hair. But the Prophet Kylo Ren spent probably an hour that night combing out my hair and braiding it for me -- a little sloppy, maybe, a little out of practice -- and for that hour I was the center of the universe._

Okay, that’s probably too much. And she’s used _hair_ twice in two sentences, which is not ideal. She’ll dial it back. 

In edits. When she types it. Not right now. 

_It wasn’t until a long time later, after Ben stopped being a Prophet and became my brother, after a lot of things, that I realized that was how I was supposed to feel. Not all the time, maybe, but sometimes. I was supposed to be the center of someone’s universe. It wasn’t wrong or sinful; I wasn’t going to Hell. I was important, and I was somebody, and I was worth spending time on._

She pauses, wipes her eyes, takes a breath. Keeps writing.

 

*

 

For once, it’s not raining. 

It isn’t quiet exactly. The pines rustle above them. Small animals scurry in the brush, and the grasshoppers and crickets are still singing. Ben shifts in the bed, and it creaks underneath him. 

Tomorrow they give the camper over to Luke and Lando and switch to tents. She’ll curl up with Finn on an air mattress, listen to Han and Chewie talk soft by the fire. Maybe Ben and Poe will be laughing in their own tent just next door. Maybe they’ll be quiet; maybe Ben will be _listening_. Poe, he’s said, sounds like a campfire. 

Maybe he’ll hear rain, too, quiet on the canvas of his tent. 

Maybe he’ll hear an internal symphony, all of them living and breathing and close to him, close enough to listen to. 

It’s a good thought. 

“You feel like --” she starts, and feels Ben stirring next to her. “You know how I said, once, that Finn feels like sunlight, and you said that seemed about right? Well, you feel like being carried. Like when I was little, and you used to pick me up and carry me sometimes, and I always felt just really safe, and important, and… I don’t know, _good_ , I guess. Like I couldn’t be bad, really, or you wouldn’t do that, carry me around like that. That’s what you feel like. To me.”

Ben’s quiet for a long time. His hand close around hers -- he shifts on the bed, stretching up to kiss her forehead. “Thank you,” he whispers. Breathes in and out, heavy, then says, “Love you.”

“Love you too,” she tells him, and he shifts back down again so they’re face to face, and at some point they fall asleep just like that, and the wind shifting in the pines sounds almost like rain.


End file.
